INTRODUCTION ACIENT INDIAN TECHNOLOGY
In Ananya: A portrait of India, S.R. Sridhar and N.K. Mattoo (eds.). AIA: New York,
1997, pages 399-420
1
`Veda' means knowledge. Since we call our earliest period Vedic, this is suggestive of the
importance of knowledge and science, as a means of acquiring that knowledge, to that period
of Indian history. For quite some time scholars believed that this knowledge amounted to no
more than speculations regarding the self; this is what we are still told in some schoolbook
accounts. New insights in archaeology, astronomy, history of science and Vedic scholarship
have shown that such a view is wrong. We now know that Vedic knowledge embraced physics,
mathematics, astronomy, logic, cognition and other disciplines. We ¯nd that Vedic science
is the earliest science that has come down to us. This has signi¯cant implications in our
understanding of the history of ideas and the evolution of early civilizations.
The reconstructions of our earliest science are based not only on the Vedas but also on
their appendicies called the Vedangas. The six Vedangas deal with: kalpa, performance of
ritual with its basis of geometry, mathematics and calendrics; shiksha, phonetics; chhandas,
metrical structures; nirukta, etymology; vyakarana, grammar; and jyotisha, astronomy and
other cyclical phenomena. Then there are naturalistic descriptions in the various Vedic books
that tell us a lot about scienti¯c ideas of those times.
Brie°y, the Vedic texts present a tripartite and recursive world view. The universe is
viewed as three regions of earth, space, and sky with the corresponding entities of Agni,
Indra, and Vishve Devah (all gods). Counting separately the joining regions leads to a
total of ¯ve categories where, as we see in Figure 1, water separates earth and ¯re, and air
separates ¯re and ether.
In Vedic ritual the three regions are assigned di®erent ¯re altars. Furthermore, the
¯ve categories are represented in terms of altars of ¯ve layers. The great altars were built
of a thousand bricks to a variety of dimensions. The discovery that the details of the
altar constructions code astronomical knowledge is a fascinating chapter in the history of
astronomy (Kak 1994a; 1995a,b).
From the tripartite model to ¯ve categories of analysis
In the Vedic world view, the processes in the sky, on earth, and within the mind are
taken to be connected. The Vedic rishis were aware that all descriptions of the universe
lead to logical paradox. The one category transcending all oppositions was termed brahman.
Understanding the nature of consciousness was of paramount importance in this view but
this did not mean that other sciences were ignored. Vedic ritual was a symbolic retelling of
this world view
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